The launch of the free version of Teams by Microsoft is designed to make it easier for potential users—usually worker teams and small businesses—to start using the company's products and then increase loyalty to their products.

Lori Wright, general manager of Microsoft 365 team work, told Reuters on June 28: "We naturally want users who use free software to upgrade to the full version.Office365 service. ”

Since the launch of Teams software in early 2017, Microsoft has been competing with Slack. Microsoft said in March that it has reached 200,000 organizations using the product. Slack said in May that a total of 70,000 organizations paid for their products. In the rapidly growing workplace collaboration software market, companies such as Slack, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google division, Cisco, Facebook and Atlassian Corp PLC have launched their own products.

According to data released by market research firm IDC, the total value of this market is expected to reach $3.2 billion by 2021.

Before Microsoft announced the release of the free version of Teams, Slack announced on Tuesday that it would improve the search capabilities of its chat app. The startup said the update would make it easier for users to find chat messages. The company said at the time that the improved search feature would work for all versions of Slack software and will be available to users in the coming weeks.

Although the features of the free version of Teams software are not comparable to the Office 365 version, they will provide features that are not available in the free version of Slack software, such as unlimited search and unlimited application integration, which will appeal to potential users.

"This is to make as many people as possible to use Teams software," said Alan Ripervskiy (Alan Lepofsky), an analyst at Constellation Research, a marketing research company. "Although this may bring pressure to Slack to force it to cancel its own software limitations, it is not so simple because these restrictions are free in Slack free of charge. It plays a vital role in the process of charging commercialization. "